Home

Christopher Horsethief is a research professor and consultant focusing on the group dynamics of collectively traumatized communities. His primary assertion is that Indigenous language and culture are inextricably linked, and that a community that supports identity through collaborative activity will continually develop capacity, differentiate knowledge and preserve its identity through complex network architectures. Colonization, on the other hand, can be described as the fragmentation of these networks. Christopher's research centers on the social network activity of traumatized community members, and the interpretation of their spoken collaborative actions.

His consulting career applies scientific frameworks to analyze qualitative and quantitative data.

Key Insights

Christopher's academic and professional research has spanned 20 years among the Columbia Basin tribes. In this time he has adapted social science research frameworks to meet the needs of tribal research. These include economics (econometric research and economic development), statistical analysis (census and survey design, data gathering, regression & ANOVA analysis), and social network analysis (data retrieval, interpretation, visualization, and computational modeling).

The key insights relating to Indigenous language to emerge include:

Culture forms through sustained interaction

Language is a shared phenomenon which allows participants to describe concepts, explore boundaries, and form community.

Communities engage in patterned communication which results in group culture.

Culture is the social DNA that directs community members how to interact appropriately with one another.

Interaction such as sharing, caring, and communicating forms networks of relationships.

Relationships between community members, their environment, and their knowledge become more sophisticated as the community continually solves problems.

Sustainable community solutions provide stability if and only if the participants are able to encode memories, recall information, and communicate ideas between community members.

Colonization is the reversal of this process

Colonization is the subjugation of a community's high-context processes in favor of the Colonizer's low context processes -- it separates community members from a sense of community, the identity of family, and protection of self.

When this decontextualization is a sustained historic process the collective may become traumatized.

Collective trauma fundamentally changes the way community members relate to one another, to the group, and themselves -- it distorts the culture's problem-solving tools.

This distortion increases the cultural disorder within a group. This entropy results in ineffective transfer of identity between generations, ineffectual relationships, and weak family bonds.

The way to reverse cultural entropy is to recreate context

If colonization fragments the Indigenous culture beyond repair then new network structures will appear random.

However recent analytics drawn from a variety of Native American and First Nations social networks indicate complex network structures such as small world architectures, low geodesic distances, and high clustering.

Community members engaging in online language and cultural activities are recreating Indigenous context within their communities.

This context belongs to the whole community and is irreducible to any single participant.

Recent research illustrates context in terms of Indigenous placenames, Native language use, small group problem-solving, First Nations genealogy, and identification of symptoms of cultural trauma.

Extensive research in the Ktunaxa Speech Community has identified several high-contrast, low-impact context-building resources associated with improved group dynamics. These solutions are shown in this site's services page.

Contact Christopher Today!

Contact Christopher to see how he can help your speech community customize an approach to language revitalization and leadership! Christopher’s services can increase your speech community’s accessibility to relevant and user friendly curriculum materials and options for language delivery. Christopher’s research always focuses on developing self-determined methods that best represent your community identity.﻿